Butler University - College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

The Liberal Arts: The term ‘liberal arts’ comes to us from the medieval university, where the seven liberal arts formed the core curriculum for free persons – as contrasted with the vocational education of servants, laborers and tradesmen. In its time it was an education for a small elite. While the content of liberal arts curricula have changed a great deal since that time, liberal arts education still at its heart seeks to provide students with the capacities they require to be free and autonomous agents – people capable of making intellectually and morally responsible decisions regarding their lives and of actively and fruitfully participating in the communities to which they belong. To the extent that we think that all human beings deserve such freedom, we should aspire to liberal education for all.

The capacities of a liberally educated person that we should hope to develop are, first of all, concrete communication skills – the ability to read, write and speak. But for these skills to really make anyone free, they must be coupled with the ability to responsibly choose for oneself what to believe and what to value. In this course we shall develop these most important abilities by entering into conversations amongst ourselves and with some great writers who represent the most significant strands of western culture – the literary, philosophical and scientific tradition of ancient Greece, the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, and the thought of the scientific revolution and enlightenment. These writers all are concerned with questions of what to believe, what to doubt, and where to put one’s faith. As we consider their texts, we will increase our capacity to make choices for ourselves.

"Assessing the American Dream Through the Lens of Black Women” - a course offering of “The Collaborative for Critical Inquiry Into Issues of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Class” – CC 101P -07

This course will be taught with the premise that acknowledges the true value of what students learn in this class will not be realized until one is fully and independently engaged in this diverse and complex society and world. By looking at the concept of the “American Dream” from the perspective and voice of a group of people who are systematically and deliberately denied its full actualization, students will eventually understand that a liberal arts foundation is only as good as its values of justice, equality, free expression and multiculturalism, for example, are put into practice. By the end of the year students of this course will be more versed in listening, observing and discerning whether or not Americans truly live by the very creeds they hold as superior. Quite simply it is a call to question.

Through the written and the spoken words of black women, themselves, we will explore the following:

2) Interlocking gender, racial and economic issues that have and continue to marginalize black women;

3) How the experiences of black women have collectively shaped their distinctive political outlook;

4) The complex relationships between black women and black men, white men and white women, and

Our collective discussions will trace not only the layered meanings of the journey experience in storytelling, but will also seek to compass the personal journeys we all undertake in our daily lives. We will begin by honing our skills of critical analysis and insight through discussion and composition, then move into personal examination by casting ourselves as the ‘hero’ in an extended research narrative. Along the way we will practice not only finding answers, but also locating questions that we didn’t know we had. Accordingly, this method of inquiry will begin to assume the framework of investigative thinking and living. The Liberal Arts Education asks that you perceive the world and its machinations thoughtfully and critically. You will do exactly this in class on a daily basis and then extend this reflective process into your daily life.

CC 101 is your first course in Butler University's liberal arts core curriculum. The "liberal arts" are a set of educational practices deriving from the universities of medieval Europe. The mainspring of the liberal arts is the creative tension between three distinct but mutually relevant traditions of learning:

1) classical learning, based on the literary and philosophical heritage of Greece and Rome;

2) biblical learning, based on the Hebrew and Greek scriptures and their interpretation in Jewish and Christian tradition; and

3) scientific learning, based on the systematic investigation of nature that arose in the later Middle Ages and continues through the scientific revolutions of modern times including our own.

In CC 101 you will wrestle with all three strands of the liberal arts tradition. The first big texts you are asked to read are the Book of Genesis and The Phaedo, a dialogue by Plato portraying how Socrates wrestled with fundamental questions of human destiny. Later you will read two probing responses to the rise of modern science, René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. You will also read Cervantes' Don Quixote and Goethe's Faust, literary masterpieces in which you will see all three strands of liberal learning woven together in dynamic and entertaining ways.

Butler’s two-semester sequence on Global and Historical Studies in the new core curriculum continues Butler's longstanding emphasis on providing students with a broad liberal arts education that incorporates diverse global perspectives. What is the purpose of this course as relates to the liberal arts, that causes it (or other courses like it) to be required of students? This question is asked most frequently by students in the professional colleges, many of whom believe the role of a university should be to prepare students with specific skills that will enable them to get specific jobs upon graduation.

Listen, however, to what CEOs from America’s top six accounting firms had to say about what they are looking for in terms of the education of their future employees: “Passing the CPA Examination should not be the goal of accounting education. The focus should be on developing analytical and conceptual thinking – versus memorizing rapidly expanding professional standards.”[1] The education that universities offer is informed by our alumni and their experience of what is actually needed in the workplace, as well as a board of trustees consisting of people currently in, or with lengthy experience in, the world of business and careers. Memorized (and quickly forgotten) data and information are not that which is crucial. Having learned how to learn, and developing skills of critical thinking, cross-cultural communication, conflict resolution, evaluation of evidence – when one has made these skills one’s own, then one is well prepared for just about any profession. The truth of the matter is that it is this breadth of education – which is the focus and indeed the definition of the liberal arts – that makes a diploma valuable, as a university diploma and not merely one from a technical or vocational college. Of course employers look for competence in one's discipline - no one is denying that - but among the thousands of qualified pharmacists, engineers, lawyers, economists and others who graduate from college and apply for jobs in their field, what will set you apart? Employers (many of whom are now multinational corporations, and nearly all of whom face the realities of a shrinking world where people from one side of the planet are in contact with those on the other) regularly state that next most important concerns are that graduates be broadly educated, including an ability to understand, work with, and communicate effectively with people of other cultures.

You probably know the famous saying, “Give a person a fish and you have fed him or her for a day; teach a person how to fish and you have fed them for life.” A liberal arts education aims at teaching students not just important general knowledge, but teaching them how to learn. Global and Historical Studies provides a wonderful area in which to do precisely that. On the one hand, the South Asian Civilizations course includes a survey of religion and religious texts from that part of the world, and if students can learn to think critically about such big topics as religion, then thinking critically about more mundane topics less central to their worldview will seem relatively easy and painless by comparison. Global and Historical Studies is also a great place to learn to use a range of tools from various academic disciplines, since the subject will be approached via historical, archaeological, literary, social-scientific, economic, political and other perspectives.

In any given classroom at Butler, there will be students representing a range of viewpoints about religion, politics and other subjects. This provides a wonderful opportunity to develop critical realism, that approach to knowledge that assumes neither the ability to completely objectify that which is studied, nor a relativism claiming that any and all opinions are of equal value. Parker Palmer puts it wonderfully when he writes:

The only “objective” knowledge we possess is the knowledge that comes from a community of people looking at a subject and debating their observations within a consensual framework of procedural rules. I know of no field, from science to religion, where what we regard as objective knowledge did not emerge from long and complex communal discourse that continues to this day…

The firmest foundation of all our knowledge is the community of truth itself. This community can never offer us ultimate certainty – not because its process is flawed but because certainty is beyond the grasp of finite hearts and minds. Yet this community can do much to rescue us from ignorance, bias, and self-deception if we are willing to submit our assumptions, our observations, our theories – indeed, ourselves – to its scrutiny. [2]

Global and Historical Studies not only provides an opportunity to learn the aried approaches to knowledge that are crucial to a liberal arts education, and to becoming a lifelong learner on a trajectory towards a successful future. It is also an opportunity to begin to develop the habit of respectful dialogue with others with whom we disagree. It is only such encounter with different viewpoints that can keep us honest. It has been said that one never truly believes something until one has listened to the arguments of the other side. The academic study of other cultures provides students with an opportunity to become better global citizens, but also to reflect on, and work out for themselves, what they truly believe.

[1] Jean C. Wyer, “Accounting Education: Change Where You Might Least Expect It,” Change Jan.-Feb. 1993, pp.15-17 [quoted in Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1998) p.177.

[2] Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1998) p.104.

This course examines the process by which African, Indian, and other formerly colonized peoples have attempted to forge new nations, cultures, and identities in the aftermath of European colonization. During the first four weeks of the semester, we will read classic texts of late nineteenth-century British imperialism, texts which still color our views about formerly colonized parts of the world. We will then spend the remainder of the semester listening carefully as, in the words of Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, “The Empire Writes Back.” We will study famous early voices of the independence movement, read novels that examine the disappointments that often followed nationhood, consider the perspective of women in the postcolonial era, and reflect on the role of the cultural migrant and exile in a world of increasingly shrinking borders.

In keeping with the liberal arts mission of Butler University, this pilot core course will not only foster habits of critical thinking, writing, and communication that are essential to being a free and independent citizen, but also demand that you become more globally informed and responsible. By exploring how the world we live in today arrived at its current shape, it is my hope that you will be better prepared to comprehend its challenges and find just solutions to the inequities and tensions that continue to tear at the fabric of our global community.